English supplies pronouns for ownership. Some possessive pronouns are my, your, his, her, its, our, and their.Here’s a rule so important — and so often broken — that you should consider tattooing it on[more…]

To write proper English, you need to follow all the punctuation rules, even the illogical ones. Punctuation with quotations gives many people problems. Here you look at the proper punctuation for statements[more…]

English grammarians have devised a special set of rules for punctuating quotations that are questions. Pop quiz: Does the question mark go inside or outside of the quotation mark? Well, the answer is,[more…]

In English, the rules for using quotation marks with exclamation points follow the same general rules as question marks. And although you aren’t likely to use quotation marks with semicolons, in case you[more…]

English pronouns are either singular or plural. Singular pronouns replace singular nouns, which are those that name one person, place, thing, or idea. Plural pronouns replace plural nouns — those that[more…]

Most of the time, determining whether a pronoun should be singular or plural is easy. Just check the noun that acts as the antecedent, and bingo, you’re done. But sometimes a pronoun takes the place of[more…]

In English it is pretty easy to make sure your verbs and subjects agree. Basically you check to ensure that singular subjects have singular verbs and plural subjects have plural verbs. But what kind of[more…]

Just to make subject-verb agreement complicated, English grammar shuffles a sentence around to form questions and often throws in a helping verb or two. More bad news: questions are formed differently[more…]

Although making your subjects and verbs agree is pretty easy in English, there are a few common mistakes people make when the subjects of the sentences are pronouns. For example, five pronouns change from[more…]

The plurals of most English nouns already end with the letter s. To show ownership, all you do is add an apostrophe after the s. Many people don’t believe it, but it is true. Take a look at these examples[more…]

In your writing, sometimes you may need to include the title of a magazine, the headline of a newspaper article, the title of a song or movie, and so on. In English, when punctuating these magazine titles[more…]

In English you can use series commas when you list items. Separating items in a list helps clarify things. Imagine that you text a shopping list to your roommate Charlie, who’s at the store shopping for[more…]

In English, rules about punctuation with quotation marks are little complicated. But here is the most complicated situation of all. Sometimes you need to place a quotation inside a quotation. Yikes. How[more…]

Hyphens are multipurpose punctuation marks. They help you maneuver through unexpected line breaks, separate parts of compound words, write certain numbers, and create one description from two words. Here[more…]

If human beings were called only by their names, life would be much simpler, at least in terms of capital letters and English grammar rules. But most people pick up a few titles and some relatives as they[more…]

Even if nothing more than your imagination leaves the living room, you still need to know the rules for capitalizing the names of places, languages, geographical features, regions, and directions. And,[more…]

In English, writers often string together a bunch of single-word descriptions, adjectives, in grammar lingo. If you have a set of descriptions, you probably have a set of commas also. Take a look at the[more…]

Commas are good, all-purpose separators. They won’t keep you and your worst enemy apart, but they do a fine job on addresses and dates — especially when items that are usually placed on individual lines[more…]